Noah’s Ark Found!!

[Politesse]

In American archaeology, it's the fabled "White City" of the Miskito Coast. National Geographic Society alone seems to send a video team down to "discover" it again once every 2-3 years. Since there are ruins a-plenty in Mesoamerica and none of them have labels, there's nothing to stop them from spotting something funny on the LIDAR and calling it whatever they like for the next Could This Be special. Ditto for the many Los Dorados, though those have been falling off in popularity in the last two decades.

 

[Bronzeage]

A flood myth is almost universal in cultures for the simple reason it makes a good story. Floods are scary but if you have a boat, you get to live while everybody else drowns, along with their livestock. Great drama. Surviving a tornado because you live in a hole in the ground doesn't have the same romance.

There is a simple reason so many people have tried to find and a lot have claimed to find the Noah's Ark. It's the only Biblically documented artifact that is unique and substantial enough we would know it if we saw it. All the other physical subjects in the Bible are geographical locations. All the places named in the Bible are still there, most with the original name, but that proves nothing. A documented archeological dig of a large wooden boat, buried in a mountainside, well above sea level is the gold standard of Biblical inerrancy. The desire to find this is so great, some people will give money to the cause. This naturally leads to other people willing to take the money and go looking in the last known vicinity of the Ark. One thread that runs through Arkeology is since no one knows what the remains of a 4000 year old wooden boat would look like today, any mysterious or unexplained pattern in the geology could be the Ark, as it is written in the Book of Rorschach.

 

[thebeave]

A flood myth is almost universal in cultures for the simple reason it makes a good story. Floods are scary but if you have a boat, you get to live while everybody else drowns, along with their livestock. Great drama. Surviving a tornado because you live in a hole in the ground doesn't have the same romance.

There is a simple reason so many people have tried to find and a lot have claimed to find the Noah's Ark. It's the only Biblically documented artifact that is unique and substantial enough we would know it if we saw it. All the other physical subjects in the Bible are geographical locations. All the places named in the Bible are still there, most with the original name, but that proves nothing. A documented archeological dig of a large wooden boat, buried in a mountainside, well above sea level is the gold standard of Biblical inerrancy. The desire to find this is so great, some people will give money to the cause. This naturally leads to other people willing to take the money and go looking in the last known vicinity of the Ark. One thread that runs through Arkeology is since no one knows what the remains of a 4000 year old wooden boat would look like today, any mysterious or unexplained pattern in the geology could be the Ark, as it is written in the Book of Rorschach.

If the remants of some sort of wooden boat is found, it should be easy to identify as Noah's Ark. Check the wood species, and if its made of gopher wood, then chances are you've found it.*

* But first, we need to figure out what the hell gopher wood is.

 

[SLD]

Sure would be funny if they found it was really Gilgamesh’s ark. Holy crap! We’ve been worshipping the wrong gods for 4,000 years!!!

 

[Politesse]

In a sense, Noah's ark cannot avoid being Gilgamesh's ark as well, as the two stories are clearly derived from the same mythic cycle shared between cultures. That said, since both stories describe (different) oddly specific directions on building the thing, it would be interesting to see whether the ark they found was square or rectangular in footprint.

 

[robnisch]

There were a lot of floods at the end of the last ice age. There were humans that witnessed them, right?
Humans like to tell stories about past events. Then they wrote them down.
Look at the Missoula floods in the PNW.
I don't know about native oral traditions about those floods, but there must be some.

 

[bilby]

There isn't an absolute limit on how old the materials are that can be detected by ground penetrating radar.

Of course not. It's entirely dependent on the conditions. But the typical practical limit is about 500 years. The Early Medieval period was called the "Dark Ages" partly because the majority of structures in that era were built from timber, which leaves very faint traces in most conditions.

If there's a significant cavity to be found, GPR can potentially detect it. Would I expect the remains of a 5,000 year old boat to turn up on a GPR survey? Of course not. But then I wouldn't expect the remains of a hundred year old boat left exposed on the surface to turn up either. Wood rots quickly.

Exactly.

A hilltop site is generally a very poor location for archaeology too - long-term preservation of timber requires anoxic conditions such as those found in swamps. Hilltops tend to be erosive environments, with the natural bedrock very close to the surface. Not much (other than hard stone) survives in such conditions for decades, much less for millennia.

Noah's Ark could not have existed, but if it had, it would be vanishingly unlikely to have left detectable remains, and if it did, GPR would be a poor choice of technique to attempt to find them.

In summary, these guys are fucking nuts.

 

[Bronzeage]

There isn't an absolute limit on how old the materials are that can be detected by ground penetrating radar.

Of course not. It's entirely dependent on the conditions. But the typical practical limit is about 500 years. The Early Medieval period was called the "Dark Ages" partly because the majority of structures in that era were built from timber, which leaves very faint traces in most conditions.

If there's a significant cavity to be found, GPR can potentially detect it. Would I expect the remains of a 5,000 year old boat to turn up on a GPR survey? Of course not. But then I wouldn't expect the remains of a hundred year old boat left exposed on the surface to turn up either. Wood rots quickly.

Exactly.

A hilltop site is generally a very poor location for archaeology too - long-term preservation of timber requires anoxic conditions such as those found in swamps. Hilltops tend to be erosive environments, with the natural bedrock very close to the surface. Not much (other than hard stone) survives in such conditions for decades, much less for millennia.

Noah's Ark could not have existed, but if it had, it would be vanishingly unlikely to have left detectable remains, and if it did, GPR would be a poor choice of technique to attempt to find them.

In summary, these guys are fucking nuts.

If Noah's Ark did exist, and it's final resting place was still intact, it would be fairly easy to detect and identify. We wouldn't expect to find any wood, but we would expect to find a large amount of Bitumen spread in a thin layer in a roughly Ark shape pattern. Waterproofing boats with Bitumen is a practice which dates to before the supposed building of Noah's Ark, so he certainly would have used it, and probably quite a lot of it. Unlike wood, it will not decompose or degrade in any meaningful way. A large oval patch of Bitumin found buried in some Turkish hillside would be proof that some sort of boat was left there.

The "I found Noah's Ark!" craze has been going on for a couple centuries now. I have never heard anyone mention Bitumin as part of the search criteria.

 

[SLD]

There isn't an absolute limit on how old the materials are that can be detected by ground penetrating radar.

Of course not. It's entirely dependent on the conditions. But the typical practical limit is about 500 years. The Early Medieval period was called the "Dark Ages" partly because the majority of structures in that era were built from timber, which leaves very faint traces in most conditions.

If there's a significant cavity to be found, GPR can potentially detect it. Would I expect the remains of a 5,000 year old boat to turn up on a GPR survey? Of course not. But then I wouldn't expect the remains of a hundred year old boat left exposed on the surface to turn up either. Wood rots quickly.

Exactly.

A hilltop site is generally a very poor location for archaeology too - long-term preservation of timber requires anoxic conditions such as those found in swamps. Hilltops tend to be erosive environments, with the natural bedrock very close to the surface. Not much (other than hard stone) survives in such conditions for decades, much less for millennia.

Noah's Ark could not have existed, but if it had, it would be vanishingly unlikely to have left detectable remains, and if it did, GPR would be a poor choice of technique to attempt to find them.

In summary, these guys are fucking nuts.

If Noah's Ark did exist, and it's final resting place was still intact, it would be fairly easy to detect and identify. We wouldn't expect to find any wood, but we would expect to find a large amount of Bitumen spread in a thin layer in a roughly Ark shape pattern. Waterproofing boats with Bitumen is a practice which dates to before the supposed building of Noah's Ark, so he certainly would have used it, and probably quite a lot of it. Unlike wood, it will not decompose or degrade in any meaningful way. A large oval patch of Bitumin found buried in some Turkish hillside would be proof that some sort of boat was left there.

The "I found Noah's Ark!" craze has been going on for a couple centuries now. I have never heard anyone mention Bitumin as part of the search criteria.

God commanded that Noah use pitch inside and out. So yes it would. We have bitumen residue going back 70,000 bp.

ETA:

Here’s what AI said about finding the ark and bitumen: “Wood rots away over thousands of years, and petrifaction requires very specific conditions. Bitumen, however, is a heavy hydrocarbon that does not easily biodegrade, dissolve in water, or rust away. In standard archaeology, even when the wooden planks of an ancient ship have completely vanished, black crusts of bitumen caulking usually remain perfectly preserved in the soil, retaining the exact shape and impressions of the long-gone wood. If the Durupınar site were the Ark, there should be literal tons of black, tarry residue mixed into the earth.”

And they haven’t found anything like that.

 

[WAB]

This just in: Jimmy Hoffa was found hiding in the remains of the Ark. Now 113 years old, he is still hale and quite spry. He was reported as shouting incoherently at his discoverers.

"Something about juniper bushes," one observer reported.

 

[Bronzeage]

There isn't an absolute limit on how old the materials are that can be detected by ground penetrating radar.

Of course not. It's entirely dependent on the conditions. But the typical practical limit is about 500 years. The Early Medieval period was called the "Dark Ages" partly because the majority of structures in that era were built from timber, which leaves very faint traces in most conditions.

If there's a significant cavity to be found, GPR can potentially detect it. Would I expect the remains of a 5,000 year old boat to turn up on a GPR survey? Of course not. But then I wouldn't expect the remains of a hundred year old boat left exposed on the surface to turn up either. Wood rots quickly.

Exactly.

A hilltop site is generally a very poor location for archaeology too - long-term preservation of timber requires anoxic conditions such as those found in swamps. Hilltops tend to be erosive environments, with the natural bedrock very close to the surface. Not much (other than hard stone) survives in such conditions for decades, much less for millennia.

Noah's Ark could not have existed, but if it had, it would be vanishingly unlikely to have left detectable remains, and if it did, GPR would be a poor choice of technique to attempt to find them.

In summary, these guys are fucking nuts.

If Noah's Ark did exist, and it's final resting place was still intact, it would be fairly easy to detect and identify. We wouldn't expect to find any wood, but we would expect to find a large amount of Bitumen spread in a thin layer in a roughly Ark shape pattern. Waterproofing boats with Bitumen is a practice which dates to before the supposed building of Noah's Ark, so he certainly would have used it, and probably quite a lot of it. Unlike wood, it will not decompose or degrade in any meaningful way. A large oval patch of Bitumin found buried in some Turkish hillside would be proof that some sort of boat was left there.

The "I found Noah's Ark!" craze has been going on for a couple centuries now. I have never heard anyone mention Bitumin as part of the search criteria.

God commanded that Noah use pitch inside and out. So yes it would. We have bitumen residue going back 70,000 bp.

ETA:

Here’s what AI said about finding the ark and bitumen: “Wood rots away over thousands of years, and petrifaction requires very specific conditions. Bitumen, however, is a heavy hydrocarbon that does not easily biodegrade, dissolve in water, or rust away. In standard archaeology, even when the wooden planks of an ancient ship have completely vanished, black crusts of bitumen caulking usually remain perfectly preserved in the soil, retaining the exact shape and impressions of the long-gone wood. If the Durupınar site were the Ark, there should be literal tons of black, tarry residue mixed into the earth.”

And they haven’t found anything like that.

Bitumin is the result of plants that were buried in the Carboniferous Period and slow cooked with great heat and pressure. After 300 million years, I wouldn't think few thousand more is going to make a difference.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Too much speculation and special pleading. Contrast this with the scholarly approach taken by my friends, Roger and Virginia Klarvin, who located and excavated the Hill of Foreskins outside of Jerusalem a few years ago.

As Virginia wrote in National Geographic (August 2023):
"The moment of truth had come. I worked my thumb and finger into the narrow fissure in the earth and pulled out a preserved ancient foreskin, intact and still a bit stretchy after all the centuries. At that moment, Joshua 5 became a living text."

Next month, with joint sponsorship from Hobby Lobby and Chik-Fil-A, the Klarvins are opening Foreskin Encounter in Williamstown, KY. The long cylindrical building with the dramatic canopied entrance ("Step Inside the Hood") has already won rave reviews from architectural journals. One critic who was given a sneak preview tour noted in Skylines (Summer 2026):
"The main gallery is called The Shaft. A long walkway covered in a textured carpet I can only call veiny led us past exhibits of Roger and Virginia and their amazing finds. At the top of The Shaft are two circular planted areas called the Orbs. One of them features Onan's Fountain, and the other has the gift shop and boutique. Of course I bought novelty rings for my children. Yours will want them, too."

 

[Politesse]

Preservation conditions are everything. If you aren't familiar with them, you might be interested in the canoes found at La Marmotta site in Italy. They are easily the oldest boats known to Mediterranean archaeology, and are roughly as old as this Ark is supposed to be, if not a fair bit older. Sunk as they were to the anaerobic floor of a meromictic lake, they are remarkably well preserved, the grain of the alder wood they were carved from still rough to the touch. If you didn't know, you'd imagine them to have been wrecked decades ago, not millennia. Among many other remarkable objects found at the site. Rope, sickles, adzes, spindles, baskets. A remarkable glimpse into "Noah"s life, and that of his perhaps more likely contemporaries.

 

[WAB]

So, Noah was a known drunk and ran the ark aground. Did he get a DUI?

 

[Politesse]

So, Noah was a known drunk and ran the ark aground. Did he get a DUI?

Well, his son made fun of him. That may not seem like much, but there were only eight living humans at that time, so jurisprudencial options were limited.

 

[TomC]

So, Noah was a known drunk and ran the ark aground. Did he get a DUI?

Ya gotta wonder about the judgement of a deity who couldn't find a better human to start over with than a ragey drunken exhibitionist.
Tom

 

[thebeave]

So, Noah was a known drunk and ran the ark aground. Did he get a DUI?

Well, his son made fun of him. That may not seem like much, but there were only eight living humans at that time, so jurisprudencial options were limited.

IIRC, didn't he bitch back at the wrong son? What a dope!

 

[Politesse]

He invented wine cultivation, got blind drunk, and then got mocked and/or raped by his son Ham depending on how you read the metaphorical phrase "saw his father's nakedness". Then Ham, who was supposed to be the progenitor of the Canaanites aka Palestinians, was cursed to eternal servitude along with all his descendants when his father woke up. I wouldn't say the wrong son got punished initially, but it would be fair to ask what exactly Ham's own sons, grandsons, great-grandsons, etc, did to deserve getting lumped in with this curse. It's not as confusing to Jews, who do not from the word go see Noah as necessarily a morally upright figure per se, nor his curses to be divinely endorsed. But for evangelical Christians, who usually try to make the case that all of the protagonists of the Bible are moral paragons (and 100% straight cis guys who love capital accumulation) the whole episode is extremely confusing, and they write themselves in circles trying to explain away an ancient Hebrew story built on the bones of an even more ancient Egyptian myth as though it were all written as a moral parable for modern Americans.

 

[ideologyhunter]

So, Noah was a known drunk and ran the ark aground. Did he get a DUI?

Well, his son made fun of him. That may not seem like much, but there were only eight living humans at that time, so jurisprudencial options were limited.

It's gotta be one of the dorkiest Bible stories. Noah plants a vineyard, makes his own booze, gets shitfaced, and lies down buck naked in a tent. Ham comes in, sees his dad's junk, runs and tells his two brothers. These two grab a robe and walk backward into the tent and throw the robe over the dipso dad. When Noah comes to, he curses Ham for seeing his 601-year-old junk (as if seeing it wasn't punishment enough.)

Questions for my Sunday School students:
1- Was Noah right to scold Ham? Why or why not?
2- If Noah was 601, how the hell old do you think his 3 boys were? Somewhere in their 570s, maybe?
3- Art Project: Make a diorama of Ham dick-spotting his pa. Use a spent balloon for Noah's anatomy. Show it to your parents.
4- Music - Change the lyrics to Father and Son by Cat Stevens to make it a song about Ham seeing Noah's crotch. Perform for the class.

 

[Bronzeage]

So, Noah was a known drunk and ran the ark aground. Did he get a DUI?

Well, his son made fun of him. That may not seem like much, but there were only eight living humans at that time, so jurisprudencial options were limited.

It's gotta be one of the dorkiest Bible stories. Noah plants a vineyard, makes his own booze, gets shitfaced, and lies down buck naked in a tent. Ham comes in, sees his dad's junk, runs and tells his two brothers. These two grab a robe and walk backward into the tent and throw the robe over the dipso dad. When Noah comes to, he curses Ham for seeing his 601-year-old junk (as if seeing it wasn't punishment enough.)

Questions for my Sunday School students:
1- Was Noah right to scold Ham? Why or why not?
2- If Noah was 601, how the hell old do you think his 3 boys were? Somewhere in their 570s, maybe?
3- Art Project: Make a diorama of Ham dick-spotting his pa. Use a spent balloon for Noah's anatomy. Show it to your parents.
4- Music - Change the lyrics to Father and Son by Cat Stevens to make it a song about Ham seeing Noah's crotch. Perform for the class.

Apparently you've only heard the neat and tidy sanitized version of the story.